I am researching the originally Egyptian god Harpocrates to explore Egypt’s cultural influence on the wider world, as Harpocrates appears in extraordinarily widespread contexts: from Roman Britain to Ancient China, Russia to India, Uzbekistan to Spain. His iconography influenced and was influenced by religions ranging from Greek Myth to Christianity to Buddhism. In various places, his cult and iconography had seemingly different roles: for instance, his finger-to-mouth gesture, a symbol of childhood in Egypt, was seen by the Greeks as a ‘shoosh’ gesture, leading them to adopt him as their god of silence and secrets, while elsewhere that same gesture was interpreted in other culturally specific ways. Understanding his multicultural iconography and cult is a case study to explore how art and religion were exchanged across the vast ancient world.
